Elly Griffiths - A Room Full Of Bones

‘What? Oh my God.’ Suddenly Ruth’s feet can’t hold her any longer and she and Kate collapse onto a nearby chair.

‘Yes. At about three o’clock this morning,’ says Michelle, almost as if she’s talking to herself. ‘He’s very weak but they think he’s going to make a full recovery.’

‘Oh God.’ Ruth leans forward, tears spilling from her eyes. Kate touches them experimentally. ‘Mum?’

‘I’m going home to get some sleep,’ says Michelle. ‘I’ve just rung the girls. Neither of them slept a wink either.’

But I did, thinks Ruth, and so did Kate. She feels as if they have failed some important test. She stands up. ‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Thank you for telling me.’ And she turns to follow Michelle back out of the swing doors.

Michelle stops her with an imperious hand. ‘Don’t you want to see him?’

‘Yes… I… I didn’t think…’

Michelle gestures towards a door on their left. ‘He’s in there. They’ll probably let you in. Go on. Take Kate to see him.’

Judy is mopping up. She has just finished an exhaustive debrief with Whitcliffe and feels as if she has been awake for several years. Len Harris was apprehended at King’s Lynn airport, where he kept a private plane. He must have come back to the yard, seen the police cars and made a run for it. He is in the process of singing to the rooftops. Tamsin, on the other hand, drove calmly back to London, where she attempted to resume her life as a blameless solicitor and mother of two. ‘You should have seen the house,’ one of the London PCs tells Judy over the phone. ‘It was like something out of a magazine, everything perfect, a Range Rover and a BMW in the garage, two kids at private school. Poor little sods. I felt for them, setting off for school in their boaters while their mum was on her way to prison.’

Was this why Tamsin had masterminded the drugs smuggling operation, just so that she could send her children to private schools wearing boaters? It doesn’t seem enough to Judy. Tamsin was born into a wealthy family; she had obviously worked hard and established herself in her career. Her husband is a successful banker. (Does he know about it, Judy wonders, or does he think that the Range Rover and the BMW came from the Top Gear fairy?) Surely Tamsin had enough of everything without turning to crime? Maybe the more you have, the more you want. Maybe it was the adventure that appealed to her, the idea of carrying on a complicated illegal operation under the noses of her father and sister. Or maybe she just resented all the time spent on the horses. Because Tamsin, according to Caroline, was the one who really couldn’t stand horses. Randolph had been an amateur jockey, Caroline toiled away in the yard for little reward or appreciation but Tamsin really hated the animals.

Tamsin had got as far as possible from the world of mucking out, dawn rides and endless backbreaking work, only to be drawn back in at the suggestion of Len Harris, a man with vast experience, both of horseflesh and drugs. But Harris says that it was all Tamsin, right down to the idea of using the horses themselves to smuggle the drugs. ‘She got a real kick out of that.’ Harris claims that Tamsin forced him to comply, he was only obeying orders. Judy, when she has heard more about the actual process involved, feels absolutely no sympathy for Harris. Sometimes the drugs were fed into the horses’ stomachs through a tube (hence the condom in the manure) but more often they were inserted vaginally into mares and sutured to keep them in place. Apparently stud mares routinely have vulval sutures so, even if the procedure had been discovered, it wouldn’t have seemed unduly suspicious. The whole thing makes Judy feel sick. Tamsin is currently denying everything.

Romilly Smith, who arrived home on Tuesday morning to find her driveway full of police cars, was even more interesting. She didn’t seem in the least surprised to find out that her eldest daughter had been drug smuggling or that she and her accomplice had tried to murder two members of the police.

‘Poor Tammy,’ she had said, sinking into a chair. ‘I never gave her enough attention.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Randolph, who was still charging around like Ben Hur. ‘She was just greedy. And she wanted to pull a fast one over us. Show how stupid we are.’

What Judy thought strangest of all was that no one enquired where Romilly had been all night. She was wearing jeans and a black jumper and looked, to Judy’s critical eye, rather dishevelled. Where had she been all night? With a boyfriend? Caroline had apparently been in the Newmarket Arms. When Tamsin hadn’t turned up she’d been unexpectedly joined by Trace, probably still seething at Clough’s desertion. Judy thought of the shabby little pub, lights blazing, music blaring, a beacon in the dark woods. She couldn’t quite imagine Caroline and Trace at the microphone, belting out I Will Survive . Well, maybe she could. Randolph had been at a ‘private’ club in King’s Lynn. Witnesses? Plenty, apparently.

When Judy got back to the station, she found, to her slight annoyance, that Operation Octopus had not been the only excitement of the night. Head office received a call at one o’clock in the morning, informing them that a suspicious device had been sent to the University of North Norfolk. A special squad had been dispatched and had discovered not a bomb but a poisonous snake in a jiffy bag. Who would send a snake to a university (apparently it was addressed to someone in the science department)? Animal rights nutters, says a laconic Tom Henty, this sort of thing has happened before. Judy feels that she would give a lot to know what Romilly Smith had been doing at one a.m.

Judy makes her report, skating over certain aspects such as her lack of judgment in going to the yard on her own in the first place. She does, though, give Clough full credit for rescuing her. Whitcliffe keeps trying to send Clough home to rest but he insists on hanging around, limping like Long John Silver and eating a vast McDonald’s breakfast. ‘Could be a commendation in this,’ Whitcliffe tells him. Clough grins at Judy, wiping ketchup from his chin. Typical. She cracks the case and Clough gets all the glory.

Forensics teams are currently swarming all over Slaughter Hill Stables and have unearthed enough drugs ‘to float the QE2’, though why an ocean liner would want to float on pure Colombian cocaine is a mystery to Judy. The Drugs Squad thinks that the cocaine came via Dubai. Presumably, whenever a batch of horses was flown over from the Middle East, one or two were carrying the drugs inside them. She wonders how many of the stable lads were involved. She remembers Billy’s anxious squint, the studied nonchalance of the jockeys. Quite a few of them would have had to be in on it, given the regularity with which the ‘mules’ were collapsing. Judy believes, though, that Randolph and Caroline were completely in the dark. Randolph might have a recreational drugs habit but Tamsin was the professional. Nelson told her about the mysterious ‘lady’ that the Vicar was meeting at the museum. Was that Tamsin? The museum, deserted and almost invisible in its colourless back street, might have been the scene for many such meetings. Neil Topham, another man with an expensive habit, was probably in on it too. And Danforth Smith, the man who apparently loved and understood his horses. Had he known?

Tanya Fuller has interviewed Randolph and has texted Judy to say ‘phwoar’. Very well put, thinks Judy, remembering Randolph in his white shirt, riding off into the night. The Highwayman. He’d a French cocked hat on his forehead, a bunch of lace at his chin . She would fancy him herself if she had the energy.

At half-past nine, Judy has finally finished writing reports and is just tidying Nelson’s office when Clough puts his head round the door. He’s still chewing, she notices.